?I live in a different kind of environment. It is called a ?red-light area?.? The speaker is a 14-year-old girl in a workshop, one of a series organized by Apne Aap Women Worldwide for children living in the red-light areas of Kalighat and Sonagachchi. This teenager and her peers know in startlingly precise terms what the ?difference? consists of. Their essays, stories and mercilessly vivid drawings, put together in The Place Where We Live is called A Red-Light Area (Apne Aap Women Worldwide, 2005), have an indefinable power to enchant and disturb. An emotional charge pulses through their colourful imaginations and relentless gaze, yet the pieces are suffused with an unusual understanding. ?Those who do this bad work are not bad themselves,? says the young writer. She knows, with a wisdom that should hurt all adults, that ?in many cases they have been sold by their husbands or parents and friends?.

The facilitators of the programme were amazed to find that the children were not at all reluctant to speak up. Neither did they seem ashamed. The children, on their part, found that talking, writing and drawing helped them unburden themselves. The vitality of the book springs at least partly from this delight of release, and the newfound sense of comfort with adults with whom they can share their thoughts. Yet what they say is unbearably painful: their voices and visions communicate an unflinching acceptance of the realities of stigma, secrecy, coercive sex, violence, betrayal and HIV/AIDS as things that have to be dealt with, and in the end, changed.

But they will make the changes themselves; they expect nothing from anyone else. Already they are confident of their own agency, telling the adults around them that an AIDS patient should not be abandoned, but helped to live as long as possible. The clarity of the children?s attitude is almost unnerving. For example, they will be angry with any parent who gets AIDS, but they will also care for these erring adults, getting them medicines and seeking to prolong their lives. There are aspiring doctors and social workers among the writers: they will ?stop? the ?bad work? when they grow up. And the bad work is not just sex work, but its causes, such as trafficking, and effects, such as violence and HIV/AIDS, as well.

It is difficult to judge what is most disturbing in the book. The children?s wisdom, perhaps. Trafficking, says a 16-year-old, ?is the act of secretly and forcibly moving little children, young boys and girls?? Each writer on trafficking not only knows that women, little boys and little girls are sold off, but also that neighbours, uncles, and even mothers, do the selling. There are also accounts of ?men dressed as policemen? who pick up girls on lonely roads and sell them. The 16-year-old gives a step-by-step account of the way a newly trafficked girl, or a girl deliberately brought and then abandoned by her husband in a red-light area, is threatened or cajoled into sex work.

But at first glance, it is the drawings that shock the most. Matter-of-fact and coloured with care, they record what the child sees ? naked couples, violence, policemen, women waiting, a girl being sold, discarded clothes, blood. This is their normal life, but it does not affect their skill and creativity. The images are calm and measured, the colours bright, the arrangements artistic, the realities pictured brutal. They leave the rattled viewer groping for a way to respond.

Even beyond all this, the reader might find the section containing stories, hopes and dreams the most unbearable. A 14-year-old boy plans to settle down in his ?native place? in the Sunderbans, amid fruit trees with birds nesting in them, a garden full of flowers, a pond full of ducks, and a wide road in front, with a parrot, a dog and a mongoose as pets. A girl wants to ?lose? herself ?in the eternal beauty of nature?. Then in one story, a little girl teaches her father a lesson about responsibility, in another a passing gentleman helps a poor lost girl to get home and buy medicines for her mother. In the last one, a sad girl wishes everybody well but cannot be rid of sadness.

Nothing could be more telling than that.